Jack starts to stir, to knuckle at his sleepy eyes. Still half-asleep, he’s going through his wake-up routine, and any minute he’ll be peering up into her face, saying boo, mommy! Play?
A low moan rises in her throat. She chokes it back, astonished: she’d sounded just like them. Even as she’s ducking and running behind the counter for a chair to wedge beneath the doorknob, some part of her brain is flying out ahead of her, wondering why it is they make such a despairing sound, such a mournful, and what fucking right have they to mourn.
She’s got the chair under the doorknob and she’s backing, backing. But there are long shadows dragging across all the windows, not only the ones near the door, and now there’s something pressed up against the nearest one, something like a stomped windfall plum the size of her face, and from somewhere else she hears the sound of breaking glass, and every drop of blood she owns freezes in that instant into shards.
Awake now, Jack looks up at her and he’s got the wide-eyed quivery look he gets at the doctor’s office, like if he stays as still and watchful as he can, the nurse with the needle won’t know that he’s there, and that look scares her even worse than she already is, terrorizes her into moving. She has to get him out. Has to. Failing that, she has to buy enough time to draw the gun and kiss him goodbye and tell him to close his eyes and count to three like she used to do when she had a present for him because if it comes to it, the best present her useless love can give him is an easy death, but in the end, when it does come down to it, can she even give him that?
Well, now or never. She’s got him sitting on the counter, facing him into a corner toward a poster of apple varieties so he can’t see what’s happening at the doors and windows, and she’s sliding the safety off down by her hip where he can’t see that either. For a second she almost loses her resolve, almost plants one in her temple so she doesn’t have to see him die, but leaving him to get eaten even as he clings to her corpse, crying wake up mommy, that’s the one thing she won’t ever do. Give mommy a hug, she tells him, biggest hug you got, and her voice breaks to shit but she can’t do much about it, and he flings out his arms and buries his face in her neck and she holds his head there with her off hand while she slips the gun up between them, against his tiny chest, his hammering hummingbird heart, she doesn’t even have to aim he’s so small, anywhere will do. I love you, sweetie, she whispers into his hair. I’m so fucking sorry.
And suddenly she knows she won’t do it. Maybe she knew all along she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Can’t. She slings him up off the counter, back onto her arm.
They’re at the front door. They’re at the back door. They’re at the side door where the tractors unload the crates of melons in the summer, pumpkins in the fall. But it’s at the front window where they’ve broken through, and she doesn’t know if they smell her through the gap or what but they’re starting to cluster there, and even as she watches more windfalls appear at the glass, more leave the back wall windows.
Close your eyes, baby, she says, and lunges for the back door.
Now she’s running, running harder than she’s ever run. The evening’s still warm, the sunlight slowly bleeding out, and they’re still chasing her but they’re not quite closing, she’s too fast.
For now. She’s leaking pretty badly from a long gash down one arm, one cheek is clawed across, her trigger finger broke when one of them grabbed her gun and tore it free, taking the discharged bullet in the eye like a kiss. But what’s really got her attention is the place on the front of her shoulder where a plug of flesh has been subtracted. She can’t remember what happened there, but the wound is bone-deep and when she stops to dare a look at it, a tiny yellow thing falls tinkling to the road. She picks it up and sobs aloud. A tooth.
How much time does she have? Not enough. Not near enough. She has to get Jack somewhere safe, get far away from him, because they didn’t get him, she didn’t let them get him, she put her arms, her head, her back between their teeth and him, but when she turns she’ll smell the meat on him, and she can’t bear to think on that too long. Suddenly, horribly, she knows that when she runs, he won’t stay put, he’ll follow. That when she turns wrong, turns sick, and comes for him, he won’t run, not from her, he’ll probably think she’s nibbling at his face for tickles before the teeth sink in.
She has to think. She can’t. The change is coming on her, the infection nosing through her veins toward her heart, her brain, wherever it is it sinks its roots. She’s dizzy. Clammy. Her ears are ringing. She’s never been so hungry in her life. Her vision’s dimming but her sense of smell is paring to a point and she can read Jack in layers of scent: strawberries, piss-stained racecar jammies, milk-fed flesh, and fear. There’s something else there, though, something bittersweet and pungent, with a scorch against her swollen tongue like salt. He loves her. He trusts her. It oozes from his pores. She smells him and she spits and spits until her mouth stops watering.
Her mind’s starting to drop down its curtains now, but in one last burst of clarity she sees it like a movie: her and Jack, stumbling down the embankment into the flowering orchard, fleeing the open road, and she knows what happens next. The only chance he has.
She hasn’t figured out how the infection works. Maybe nobody ever will. But she’s thinking of the corpses lying dead in the parking lot, the not-quite-corpses on her tail, and her brain feels like a soaked sponge in her head, her thoughts go soggy before they quite connect, but she’s stumbling down the embankment into the flowering orchard, she’s fleeing the open road, she’s pushing through the trees to the shed she knows is there from when she took Jack apple-picking a lifetime ago. She’d had to stop and change his diaper and a sunburned woman had directed her down to the shed among the trees. Hope you got wipes, the woman told her, but at least it’s a little privacy. Key’s above the door.
Key’s there now too. She fumbles the padlock, her fingers are so cold. Fights it open. Sets Jack down so she can unfold the knife. Cuts into the back of her hand with the bladepoint, spells FIND. Spells JACK. He watches her wide-eyed, far too scared to cry.
Be brave for mommy, she tells him, kneeling down, her voice slurring to paste. Okay?
Okay, he whispers, and afterward it’s all she can do to push him inside and lock the door between them and slip the key where she won’t drop it—under her tongue, like a coin—but first she lifts his little arm up to her mouth and bites down hard.
Then she’s running back up toward the road, toward them, like the idiot in the movie who Dies That Someone Else Might Live, waving her arms and yelling. Once she’s got their attention she takes off down the road, away from him, away from them, and, herd that they are, they follow.
They chase her for a quarter mile before the infection takes her over. It slows her to their speed and they fall in step around her, she disappears among them, like a droplet entering the sea.
Now she’s got something carved into her hand but she can’t read it. There’s something in her mouth so she spits it out. There’s blood on her lips, though, and more blood off back somewhere behind her, she can smell it on the wind, and that’s something she can understand.
The thing on the door of the little building is mysterious to her, so she takes it in one hand and pulls until it breaks. The door falls open and there’s one like her on the floor, like her only smaller, curled up in a ball and gnawing on a brick. She knows that hunger, knows it deep. The virus has imprinted it upon her every cell. Somewhere even deeper she knows the thing that pulls itself to sitting, blinks up at her with eyes like soft-boiled eggs, and smiles. Boo, mommy! it gurgles around the bolus of its tongue. Mommy play?